Have a seat, put your feet up, and get ready for a motivating creative activities you can do with your children or students. This is a wonderful book to help parents and educators better understand and stimulate their creativity. She begins by defining creativity and nurturing then goes on to describe how you can encourage a child’s creativity by giving you step-by-step instructions and recipes for creative activities. Even if you think your child is creatively challenged she will explain in detail how to spark that creativity that you feel is non-existent. The most helpful part of this book for me was how she went into detail about how to set up and organize your creative environment. Carlson briefly describes Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and has provided checklists developed by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., to consider your child’s natural intelligences when setting up your home environment. As an artist I have more supplies than is imaginable and it can be extremely disorganized. Not to mention my husband is a musician and both of us are athletic. As you can imagine my child is probably overwhelmed by supplies and tools to be creative. The first part of this book had me so intrigued that I could not put it down. As an educator, artist, and parent I was overjoyed to find a resource that had endless resources for me to refer to. There are often times that I question how I could be encouraging those around me in a different way and this is exactly what I was searching for. This is a book that every parent and educator with a creative child should read and enjoy.

About the Author :Ginger Carlson, M.A., Ed. has nearly twenty years experience working with families of young children. She has served as adjunct faculty at the University of Oregon, and taught in public and private schools in the United States as well as in International and Embassy schools abroad.

GIVEAWAY:Courtesy of the publisher, and The Opinionated Parent I have one copy of this book to giveaway. If you would like to win a copy, just leave me a comment. Please no I want to win stuff, but instead comment about my portfolio or give helpful advice on how to get discovered. You MUST have a U.S. address to be eligible for this contest. Be sure to leave me an email to contact you if you win... make it easy on me. Anonymous comments without an email will be deleted. OPTIONAL: I would love for you to write your own post, inviting your friends to check out this site. Spread the word because everyone can benefit from this giveaway! Blog about this giveaway on your blog with a link back to this contest let me know and you will be entered for this contest twice.Deadline to enter is June 1st at 11:59 PM EST. Winners will be notified via email as will be announced here on my blog. Winners have 72 hours to reply or will forfeit their prize to an alternate winner who will be drawn at random.

16 comments:

I don't know how to get discovered, but I do know that success comes from openness to life's messages, resourcefulness, creativity, and continual evaluation of our purposes and choices. I think your drawings are beautiful and I wish you success!

I am enjoying The Wondershop blog and the book sounds really great. I am wanting to focus more on encouraging art and creativity in my children. The experience and ideas from others is a real support from me, a girl raised on TV.

What beautiful portraits! You could do tattoo artistry. People love portrait tattoos, but there arent many good portrait artists. Blogged ya:http://mommyland512.blogspot.com/2008/05/win-child-of-wonder-book.htmlGreat giveaway, thanks!

Your portraits are beautiful. This might be an indirect way to get discovered, but I would like to direct you to www.wetcanvas.com, if you have not been there before. Its an amazing artist community which is the sole reason I got back into art. It has enriched my life and I have been blessed to find lots of really wonderful professional artists there who are willing to help and guide. Its a great fun place to hang out too. Thanks!Bhavana

Do you have an Etsy shop? Depends on what magnitude you want to get "discovered" I suppose. I will say that I am very impressed with your work. My goodness, what a wonderful gift you have that others can treasure!

After looking at your gallery, one of my suggestions would be to have a picture of the original next to the picture of your work so that people can see how true to the original your work is.

As a photographer, one of my ideas to get your name out there is to contact a local photographer whose work you like, and ask if you can donate a drawing to one of his/her clients or to the photographer themselves to hang in their studio. Then you blog about it, hopefully they will, too.

You want to get your name out locally first. As Mary & Heather say, "get famous in your home town first". :D

This might be obvious, but what about offering a freebie? Obviously, offering things free (and especially registering with Prizey) bring a lot of people your way. You could offer a free sketch. That would certainly get you some exposure.

Your drawings are well crafted, really old fashioned and sweet. To really round out your portfolio, I think you need more action or narrative images that capture people DOING what they like - like the guitar player.

I like your portfolio a lot, you're work is very talented. I think the only changes you could make are to make the labeling simpler to seem more professional, and bigger pictures to see the details, but I love the drawings and how you captured the characters. If you check on my blog page, I have a link to my on-line portfolio and you can see how I set it up. It may not be what you want though....Thanks for stopping by my blog by the way and I have you entered! Jen R

Follow by Email

Google+ Followers

All About Me

Taking personalization to the next level, creating exclusive hand-drawn portraits just for you and delivered right to your home! You select the photograph and send it to me via email or snail mail. This way you avoid all the long hours posing in my studio. This also allows me to take my buisness nation wide instead of limiting myself to locals. Make sure you visit my website to view my portfolio.